Jeffrey Katzenberg offered to pay $75 million for three more Breaking Bad episodes

Jeffrey Katzenberg may have staked his claim as the biggest Breaking Bad fan ever. The DreamWorks CEO revealed at the Mipcom market during Cannes that, six weeks ago, he planned to offer a whopping $75 million for creator Vince Gilligan to make three more episodes after the series finale, "Felina".

Here's what he had to say during his keynote session earlier today.

"I had this crazy idea. I was nuts for the show. I had no idea where this season was going. The last series cost about $3.5 million an episode. So they would make more profit from these three shows than they made from five years of the entire series. I said (to them), 'I'm going to create the greatest pay-per-view television event for scripted programming anybody's ever done.'"

He had offered to pay $25 million for each of three 90-minute episodes, that he planned on breaking into six-minute segments to air online over the course of 30 days, charging viewers between 50 cents and 99 cents for the extra content. However, this was before the executive knew how the series was set to end, which rendered his plan moot.

Based on the 10.3 million viewers that tuned in for the finale, if all of those fans would have paid a dollar a day for these 30 six-minute episodes, that would equate to more than $300 million in revenue from just 180 minutes of content.

Jeffrey Katzenberg added that he told this particular story to illustrate the growing market for short form entertainment.

"I share the story with you only to tell you that I have the courage of my convictions in this. I just think that there is a whole new platform for (short form) entertainment ... and the higher the quality of the stuff that fills it, the higher people will be paid for the work that they are doing there."

It's also worth noting that DreamWorks Animation purchased the YouTube channel AwesomenessTV for $33 million in April, which may have been the online outlet for these potential episodes.

Would you have paid to watch more Breaking Bad episodes online? Let us know!

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Comments (11)

I think it could be possible to make those series if the main character in them would be Jessie Pinkman. You could tell a story of what happened to him after the events of the last episode. Another cool thing would be if Walter Jr. aka Flint would suddenly take an interest in his father's past and maybe would even appreciate it! Just think about it! Heizemberg Jr. :D